Tripwire announced today that Red Orchestra 2 will be pushed back until September 13th, 2 weeks later than their previous release date of August 30th. While two weeks isn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, I can’t help but thinking this only hurts RO2’s potential uptake by multiplayer shooter fans.

Moving RO2’s release date into September means that it will directly come into competition with BF3’s open beta, which will be immensely popular. After that, you have BF3’s official release in October, and right behind that is the next installment of CoD. You could argue that people who play RO will have no interest in BF or CoD, but it’s hard to deny there is a lot of crossover there, and people who may have been willing to try a new experience in RO2 during a time when no other titles were competing will instead stick with the name-brands they know during the pre-holiday video game rush.

On the bright side, a large reason why Tripwire is moving the release date back is due to the overwhelming number of pre-orders, which also gives access to a beta of the game, pre-release. They weren’t quite ready for the volume of beta users, so they need to readjust their preparations for that. I hope that it works out for RO2 and Tripwire, but it appears that launching in prime release time might not be their best strategy for gaining a critical mass of online players. Maybe I’ll be wrong.

funk

I have been involved in both computers and video games since a very young age, cutting my teeth (literally) on an Apple IIe and an Intellivision. I've been writing about both for fun, off and on throughout the years, which eventually led me here -- still playing games and casually writing about them off an on.
Follow @dab784